Blog

A Practioner’s Introduction to DataAccess

I know what you’re thinking, “When did Tealium launch a new product?” With AudienceStream out of its infancy and in wide adoption mode, we have given birth to our third child affectionately, and officially, named Tealium DataAccess.

What is DataAccess, you ask? As our website eloquently states: The Tealium DataAccess solution is a rich set of customer data services and feeds delivered at the speed needed to fuel strong personalization and other timely customer interactions. DataAccess offers a clean, fully correlated dataset for your business intelligence (BI) or enterprise customer data initiatives.

So, let’s talk about what this rich set of customer data services is at a high level.

First, if the name didn’t give it away, the solution is about accessing your data. It all starts with TealiumiQ and the foundation of the data layer; combine all your vendor and page data in such a way that it can be easily accessed and augmented. Next comes AudienceStream and the ability to assign attributes (characteristics) and audiences (segments) to visitors. Tealium now has access to a wide range of visitor data, and clients have expressed interest in owning it, often asking, “How can I populate my data warehouse with clean, relevant data about my customers and all their actions across all mediums?”

Therefore, DataAccess was created as a service to give customers access to that rich set of customer data. It started a couple of years ago with EventStore (a.k.a Legacy EventStream or uConnect), and we have continually expanded the capabilities to offer several ways to store and access the data.

DataAccess is broken down by the type of data: TealiumiQ outputs event-level data, AudienceStream outputs audience-level data. Both levels of data can be output in various formats so they can be ingested into several types of systems.

This data can be fed directly to an on-premise data repository (*Direct), fed to an Amazon S3 cloud-based storage environment (*Store), or fed to an Amazon Redshift data warehouse (*DB). Here is a graph of each service. A breakdown of each product from will be provided in a followup post.

The breadth of options for analyzing this data can speak to multiple data lovers. Marketers can continue to use the tools they know and love (such as Google Analytics) while data analysts and BI users can work with the same source of data using the tools they prefer.

A final point of thought. The beauty of the Tealium data layer is that it declares web event and basic visitor data. While only some of that data is sent to your analytics vendor (s.prop42 or custom dimension 9), the entire data layer is available within DataAccess. With a data visualization tool such as Tableau and a data scientist at your disposal, many reports from an analytics tool can be rebuilt. Depending on the complexities of the reports needed, could DataAccess replace your analytics solution? While it may not be possible for everyone, it certainly may be possible for some – most notably, Tableau users.

I am an Internet specialist with 11 years of experience in both corporations and startups. Combined with an MS-IST degree, I have a wide view of the digital landscape and have shown aptitude for learning new dimensions of the industry quickly and thoroughly. I have most recently led ground up deployment efforts for 2 industry changing products: Tealium iQ and AudienceStream. These continue to be enjoyable experiences due to the opportunity of guiding companies - both large and small - down a path that has never been traveled before. Being on the leading edge of these technologies has expanded my knowledge in many ways.